{"id":3631,"date":"2012-02-09T11:53:18","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T16:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.multiplier-effect.org\/?p=3631"},"modified":"2012-02-09T11:55:32","modified_gmt":"2012-02-09T16:55:32","slug":"bernanke-visits-alternate-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/bernanke-visits-alternate-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernanke Visits Alternate Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well then.\u00a0 Apparently not everyone agrees that the Federal Reserve is having trouble balancing its dual mandate.\u00a0 Rather, I should say that not everyone agrees about the nature of the imbalance.\u00a0 From the <em>Boston Globe<\/em>&#8216;s reporting of Ben Bernanke\u2019s appearance in front of the Senate Budget Committee, we find <a href=\"http:\/\/bostonglobe.com\/business\/2012\/02\/08\/fed-calls-its-inflation-jobs-tactics-balanced\/zv8o9IUzIIZVXxhNiNM83K\/story.html\">this<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201c<strong>It seems to me that you care more about unemployment than about inflation<\/strong>,\u2019\u2019 said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want to disabuse any notion that there is a priority for maximum employment,\u2019\u2019 Bernanke responded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Bernanke deserves credit here for refraining from hitting himself over the head with a frying pan in response.\u00a0 (Is this just a cynical form of \u201cworking the ref\u201d or does the Senator really believe it?\u00a0 If the latter, what more could possibly disabuse him of this notion?)\u00a0 I suggested <a href=\"http:\/\/www.multiplier-effect.org\/?p=3527\">yesterday<\/a> that you &#8220;don&#8217;t need to look very hard&#8221; to see that the Federal Reserve is doing much better at keeping inflation in check than at controlling unemployment\u2014but you do need to <em>look<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll outsource the rest to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/freeexchange\/2012\/02\/monetary-policy-2\"><em>The Economist<\/em><\/a> (where Ryan Avent performs the literary equivalent of hitting himself over the head with a frying pan):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>During the second half of 2010, annual inflation stood at its lowest level in over <em>half a century<\/em>. Unemployment, by contrast, peaked at 10.0%. Only once in the post-war period did the jobless rate rise above that level. Only twice in the postwar period has the country experienced a recession that brought the unemployment rate above its <em>current<\/em>\u00a0level, at 8.3% [&#8230;] I&#8217;m left to muse that Mr Grassley must say good-bye when he enters a room and hello when he leaves, and wears his shoes on his head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well then.\u00a0 Apparently not everyone agrees that the Federal Reserve is having trouble balancing its dual mandate.\u00a0 Rather, I should say that not everyone agrees about the nature of the imbalance.\u00a0 From the Boston Globe&#8216;s reporting of Ben Bernanke\u2019s appearance in front of the Senate Budget Committee, we find this: \u201cIt seems to me that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,40],"tags":[76,203,1128,7,39],"class_list":["post-3631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-employment","category-monetary-policy","tag-ben-bernanke","tag-dual-mandate","tag-employment","tag-federal-reserve","tag-inflation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3631"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3641,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631\/revisions\/3641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}